The Built Environment

I'm writing poems on substack instead of turning the content I want to write about into fiction! What else is new. Anyway, this will be in a short story, but first, once with feeling.

In South Carolina, they have FDOT highway markers that say 
                                 "drive safely in memory of," 
with the name of the person who died there. Gone are the crosses 
made of paint stirrers and old frame wood I grew up seeing on the sides 
of the road before and after your car jumped 
the potholes onto the spillways and lakes that ate up any land.
 I think a lot about that kind of separation; the way a car crash 
over the water takes away from your family 
the ability to memorialize you on the spot it happens. Nothing much
stays on the sides of the bridges besides
                                     a dead bird and tire rims. 
In South Carolina, though, the government can thrust
that metal highway marker down in any segment of the road. 
I think about which is a better form of paying respect. 
Would I rather people see the truth of my death (in highway gothic) 
or see the truth of those who loved me? Everything we do to cut 
to the heart of truth seems to make it grow 
twice as many heads as it had before. 
There's a water tower that billows into the bulbous shape 
of a giant peach. More signs about Jesus and dying. A confederate flag 
that wags its ugly tail in the wind. I pay 20 dollars to wear 
the dress someone's grandmother cared enough for
 to smother in mothballs, even after she couldn't 
get the zipper up over her sun-spotted skin. People still find ways 
to drape plastic flowers and never-quite deflated 
mylar balloons over the FDOT's tombstones, and the dead grass 
on highway ditches in the winter still goes rust red and curls itself 
like a scab, regardless of where you are in the South.